According to Isaacson's biography of Musk, Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part in Tesla and SpaceX machines. He's willing to go too far, having to sometimes put a part back in.
Everything in the manufacturing process is also challenged to justify its existence.
This is how he managed to reduce the costs by 90%.
Isaacson’s “biographies” are glorified puff pieces. Musk is as unrecognizable in his as Jobs was in his.
Both Tesla and SpaceX had teams keeping Musk busy on bs just so that the engineering teams could do their work.
The second he took control, we got the cybertruck and the starship, the worse products both companies ever built (or attempted, in the case of the starship).
> Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part
This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case.
Musk is very lucky to be moving such quantities of money that his companies are big enough to protect themselves from him, if you ever wonder how Musk would fare on a tight budget, look no further than the Oceangate.
Do you remember when he bought Twitter and fired everyone, and the mass media and employee outcry was that a) the service would stop working and b) he would bankrupt the company, yet a few years later it’s massively more successful than Twitter ever was as a public business?
Regardless your thoughts on Elon, his drug habits, and his political brashness, I don’t think you can say he’s in any way close to the Oceangate guy. There is something legitimately special about him and his collective.
Twitter is definitely not more successful now than before. So many people left and are gone forever.
I would read a deep dive though into the history of Twitter (with the financials) to understand better and I do get that for a single product company there really is a point at which you give up on finding the next big thing and just optimize on your main thing and you really just need a few dozen awesome people and a rotation of new hires to keep things rolling but not thousands of engineers.
Maybe I’m overstating “massively more successful” but to my understanding “X” has roughly twice the active use count that Twitter did, although that includes Grok.
That said, do you remember these kinds of articles?
> Musk summons engineers to Twitter HQ as millions await platform’s collapse
> “Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks.” Melissa Ingle: “I don’t see how it lasts the month.” “All signs point to some catastrophic failure of the system, and very soon.”
Elon was firing people left and right and literally physically destroying Twitter’s data centers. I remember hundreds of these hysterical articles and tweets that very clearly did not come to pass. He obviously did something more clever than the authors of these articles expected… is all I’m claiming.
I haven't posted anything on this HN submission yet, but all I'm claiming is that Twitter was so successful under Elon's management that he thought it was better to roll it into SpaceX than to keep it independent. Kind of like solar city was merged into Tesla to bail it out and then it winded down after the acquisition while nobody is looking.
Yes, and Tesla and SpaceX are both ridiculously overvalued by any fair measure.
But we can separate the financial inanity of his empire from the question, which is whether Elon is a capable engineering mind or simply an ‘Isaacson puff piece recipient’.
> yet a few years later it’s massively more successful than Twitter ever was as a public business?
Twitter has certainly been a glowing success at becoming a right-wing propaganda chamber for Musk but as a commercial venture not really. Revenue is down 60% since Musk bought it.
It also doesn't factor in the dramatically reduced costs. It's likely that X is already significantly more profitable than Twitter was. And with less dependency on advertisers, which is a huge win in and of itself.
He also unbanned a lot of people and got Trump back, got to ride the AI wave with Grok, pushed paid subscriptions and implemented paying people for tweeting. I would argue growing the platform by bringing back people that were brought back for violating the original rules is not a win. Nor is attracting people to the platform that follow those people, Nor is riding the AI train.
And even with all of that, the new users, the AI, the paid subscriptions, None none of that actually fixed the major underlying issues that Twitter is not profitable. Jack Dorsey couldn’t fix it and neither did Elon. I think he just realized having a modern media platform he controls is more powerful than it making money. He inherited a platform built by someone else, and keeps the lights on with a skeleton crew. I don’t see that as a success
More to the point, MAUs are a measure of reach and not revenue or business health.
Looking at this from an investment standpoint (as if, e.g., I were establishing funding requirements for a pension fund or an annuity or some other such financial vehicle), MAUs are a nice to have because they can establish a counterfactual[0] for volume, but I'd be looking at the performance of X's products relative to the financial performance of X's customers buying those products (e.g., for advertisers, things like conversion and customer acquisition cost come to mind), legal exposure (because of, e.g., CSAM distribution) and other tail risks, and also whether there's an existential risk to the liberal democratic order that enables the financial vehicle I'm working with to operate at all, among other portfolio-level risks.
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0: Well, kinda. The counterfactual actually comes in when we ask questions like, "If the reach changes, what happens to the economic performance?" Relying on MAUs as a baseline measure of the reachable population based on observation enables us to establish these kinds of counterfactuals.
Yes, Twitter is so “successful” Musk had to write off 50% of his “investment” out of the gate, and had to come up with an AI-hyped merger with SpaceX to compensate the banks that went in with him.
The only reason Twitter has more active users is that it removed some of the protections for bots, in particular broad filtering coming from certain country involved in a war.
You don’t think Musk is any close to the Oceangate guy? Let’s review some interesting decisions by his companies then:
- Musk mucking around with the blue checks and the bot filters in Twitter skyrocketed the amount of scams in the platform.
- Tesla uses very strict NDAs and settlement to silence the reporting of accidents
- The infamous electric door handle that locks up Teslas when power goes out was an obvious point of failure, it was ignored, people died, and now several countries have legislation against it
- Reportedly Musk had safety lines and other safety features in the factories removed for serious reasons like “not liking yellow”
- Any understanding of how to parse public insurance data will show you Tesla’s have accident rates that are multiples of other brands
- The Starship, a vessel that is intended for human transport, has no safe abort system, no way to fit one in its current state, and no plans to modify that.
Just a reminder that even a very SpaceX-friendly count (in which flights that did not attempt to land are considered “good”) puts the current reliability rate at <40%.
As a naive boundary, for clearing the 97.5% predicted crew survival, SpaceX would need to fly in the order of 300 good Starship launches.
Are you seriously claiming that as a fact? You really believe 12 minutes is too long for a bot or something? Because that has to be the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.
Measuring bot activity became harder after the API changes (I wonder why!), but there’s been some attempts at finding ways to estimate bot activity. All those measures are compatible with increases in bot activity, and incompatible with bot decline.
This is not what I personally believe. This is what experts in web analystics believe. Bots don't behave like that. They don't simulate human browsing activity by staying on a site for 10 to 12 minutes, entering the site directly (through url or bookmark), and browsing 14 pages during their visit.
Bots are perfectly capable of simulating long user sessions. Many large-volume scrapping traffic for example simulate lots of long persistent user sessions.
Considering he wanted to rescue those poor kids trapped in an underwater cave by building a submarine, the parallels are closer than you'd think...
It seems to me that partisan/political hate blinds some people so much that they are becoming ridiculous.
"This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case"
Musk has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. While not a full scientist, I doubt that "his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down" anytime often.
Have you ever been in such a situation that you describe, or is this just your prejudice speaking? AFAIK the discussions in SpaceX revolve more around things like "can this part be 3d-printed", "do we keep the actuators for part X or can it just stick out into the wind" or "should we use landing legs or not", which have nothing to do with high-school physics and everything to do with actual engineering tradeoffs.
"the starship, the worse products both companies ever built (or attempted, in the case of the starship)."
This is what tells me that you are speaking in bad faith. Starship is not yet a finished product. Judging it now makes about as sense as judging Edison's lightbulb a year before it was introduced into the market.
Starship has several issues to fix, but we can already see that a) the Raptor engines are about the best on the planet, doubly so when considering their extremely low unit cost; b) the vessel itself is very tough and performed well even in really bad situations; c) the heat shield developed a lot and the last Starship (the one which was dragged to the Christmas Island) survived reentry in very good condition; d) the amount of control (belly flops, slowing down to hover) that they have over that huge thing is unique in the history of spaceflight.
> Musk has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Clarification, Musk bought a B.A. in physics. In the Paypal S-1 in 2002, [1] Paypal's lawyers claimed that he graduated with a B.S. in Physics and B.S. in Economics in 1995.
Yet the actual degrees subpoenaed from UPenn indicate a B.A. in Physics and B.S. in Economics in 1997, two years later. He could not even remember the year he graduated or the degree he received just 5/7 years after their purported completion. I have yet to meet a single person who actually graduated from college who can not accurately recollect the year of their graduation, have you?
Most likely he did this because he was in the USA on a student visa and dropping out of UPenn in 1995 made him a illegal immigrant which his brother, Kimbal Musk, corroborated in a interview [2].
Small counterpoint: I'm 42 years old, and I would have to look at my resume to see what year I graduated college. By time I graduated I was already working full time, had a contracting company on the side, and had a family. College was just a thing that was happening, another job, it wasn't a huge life-defining event. I remember the people I met and the projects I worked on, but there's no way I'd be able to accurately tell you the exact year it was over. (I just checked the resume, I was off by 2. Yikers.)
Really, your lawyer asks you what year you graduated for a legal filing and you would give the wrong year? Not even bother to go check, just fly by the seat of your pants?
Look man I'm not a fan of Elon, but it's ridiculous to say the starship is the "worst". It's coming out of early development and has had some minor success already.
And Starship is a necessary development program to solve the hardest problem in rocketry. Literally something nobody ever achieved and SpaceX is closer then anybody ever.
Starship is already the largest orbital rocket ever build and is the second rocket to actually reuse its first stage.
In addition to that the second stage has managed to land intact, something only the Shuttle did before.
People who claim like there was some superior alternative to Starship that SpaceX could 'just' have build are just ignorant. There isn't a magical 'just' build the largest rocket ever and make it fully reusable playbook you can simply execute.
He was the chief engineer and head of product at SpaceX and Tesla for over 20 years, respectively.
On Falcon 1 and 9 he worked directly on major components of the vehicles.
In Tesla, he was heavily involved in the design of every single product they came out with. He also micromanaged Model 3 assembly automation in 2017-18.
>This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case.
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
Everything in the manufacturing process is also challenged to justify its existence.
This is how he managed to reduce the costs by 90%.
xondono · · focus · HN ↗
Isaacson’s “biographies” are glorified puff pieces. Musk is as unrecognizable in his as Jobs was in his.
Both Tesla and SpaceX had teams keeping Musk busy on bs just so that the engineering teams could do their work.
The second he took control, we got the cybertruck and the starship, the worse products both companies ever built (or attempted, in the case of the starship).
> Musk relentlessly challenges the existence of every part
This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case.
Musk is very lucky to be moving such quantities of money that his companies are big enough to protect themselves from him, if you ever wonder how Musk would fare on a tight budget, look no further than the Oceangate.
inemesitaffia · · focus · HN ↗
This is Tumblr origin nonsense, especially given that he's allegedly been involved with Engineering work he's not cleared for.
sebmellen · · focus · HN ↗
Regardless your thoughts on Elon, his drug habits, and his political brashness, I don’t think you can say he’s in any way close to the Oceangate guy. There is something legitimately special about him and his collective.
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
senordevnyc · · focus · HN ↗
AdamN · · focus · HN ↗
I would read a deep dive though into the history of Twitter (with the financials) to understand better and I do get that for a single product company there really is a point at which you give up on finding the next big thing and just optimize on your main thing and you really just need a few dozen awesome people and a rotation of new hires to keep things rolling but not thousands of engineers.
sebmellen · · focus · HN ↗
That said, do you remember these kinds of articles?
> Musk summons engineers to Twitter HQ as millions await platform’s collapse
Source: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/18/twitter-death-watch-chaos-resignations/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/18/twitter...
> “Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks.” Melissa Ingle: “I don’t see how it lasts the month.” “All signs point to some catastrophic failure of the system, and very soon.”
Source: <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063467/former-twitter-employees-fear-the-platform-might-only-last-weeks/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063467/former-t...
> Twitter ‘to lose 32m users in two years after Elon Musk takeover’
Source: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/twitter-lose-users-elon-musk-takeover-hate-speech" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/twitter-l...
Elon was firing people left and right and literally physically destroying Twitter’s data centers. I remember hundreds of these hysterical articles and tweets that very clearly did not come to pass. He obviously did something more clever than the authors of these articles expected… is all I’m claiming.
imtringued · · focus · HN ↗
Just claiming, you know.
sebmellen · · focus · HN ↗
But we can separate the financial inanity of his empire from the question, which is whether Elon is a capable engineering mind or simply an ‘Isaacson puff piece recipient’.
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
jurgenburgen · · focus · HN ↗
Twitter has certainly been a glowing success at becoming a right-wing propaganda chamber for Musk but as a commercial venture not really. Revenue is down 60% since Musk bought it.
<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-approach-advertisers-revenue-spacex-x-twitter-2026-5" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-approach-advertise...
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
Decabytes · · focus · HN ↗
And even with all of that, the new users, the AI, the paid subscriptions, None none of that actually fixed the major underlying issues that Twitter is not profitable. Jack Dorsey couldn’t fix it and neither did Elon. I think he just realized having a modern media platform he controls is more powerful than it making money. He inherited a platform built by someone else, and keeps the lights on with a skeleton crew. I don’t see that as a success
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
pohl · · focus · HN ↗
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
pohl · · focus · HN ↗
frankvdwaal · · focus · HN ↗
For example, in 2021 Twitter didn't report monthly users, but "monetisable daily active users", a metric that Musk did not understand.
I think that 650 million of X comes from a report of the SEC, but it also includes just users of Grok, not just the social media section.
So it's a different type of user, over a different time period, for a different service.
nrr · · focus · HN ↗
Looking at this from an investment standpoint (as if, e.g., I were establishing funding requirements for a pension fund or an annuity or some other such financial vehicle), MAUs are a nice to have because they can establish a counterfactual[0] for volume, but I'd be looking at the performance of X's products relative to the financial performance of X's customers buying those products (e.g., for advertisers, things like conversion and customer acquisition cost come to mind), legal exposure (because of, e.g., CSAM distribution) and other tail risks, and also whether there's an existential risk to the liberal democratic order that enables the financial vehicle I'm working with to operate at all, among other portfolio-level risks.
--
0: Well, kinda. The counterfactual actually comes in when we ask questions like, "If the reach changes, what happens to the economic performance?" Relying on MAUs as a baseline measure of the reachable population based on observation enables us to establish these kinds of counterfactuals.
Arainach · · focus · HN ↗
They both have loud, stupid, and obviously wrong ideas about how hard diving in the sea is or isn't.
xondono · · focus · HN ↗
The only reason Twitter has more active users is that it removed some of the protections for bots, in particular broad filtering coming from certain country involved in a war.
You don’t think Musk is any close to the Oceangate guy? Let’s review some interesting decisions by his companies then:
- Musk mucking around with the blue checks and the bot filters in Twitter skyrocketed the amount of scams in the platform.
- Tesla uses very strict NDAs and settlement to silence the reporting of accidents
- The infamous electric door handle that locks up Teslas when power goes out was an obvious point of failure, it was ignored, people died, and now several countries have legislation against it
- Reportedly Musk had safety lines and other safety features in the factories removed for serious reasons like “not liking yellow”
- Any understanding of how to parse public insurance data will show you Tesla’s have accident rates that are multiples of other brands
- The Starship, a vessel that is intended for human transport, has no safe abort system, no way to fit one in its current state, and no plans to modify that.
Just a reminder that even a very SpaceX-friendly count (in which flights that did not attempt to land are considered “good”) puts the current reliability rate at <40%.
As a naive boundary, for clearing the 97.5% predicted crew survival, SpaceX would need to fly in the order of 300 good Starship launches.
Those are just of the top of my head.
ETH_start · · focus · HN ↗
xondono · · focus · HN ↗
Measuring bot activity became harder after the API changes (I wonder why!), but there’s been some attempts at finding ways to estimate bot activity. All those measures are compatible with increases in bot activity, and incompatible with bot decline.
ETH_start · · focus · HN ↗
vinay_ys · · focus · HN ↗
xondono · · focus · HN ↗
Everything you’re talking about is trivial to automate with playwright.
ETH_start · · focus · HN ↗
greedo · · focus · HN ↗
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
inemesitaffia · · focus · HN ↗
fernandotakai · · focus · HN ↗
i mean, you can also read liftoff and re-entry by eric berger and you will see the same kind of thing being mentioned.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
inemesitaffia · · focus · HN ↗
Cut your crap.
inglor_cz · · focus · HN ↗
"This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case"
Musk has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. While not a full scientist, I doubt that "his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down" anytime often.
Have you ever been in such a situation that you describe, or is this just your prejudice speaking? AFAIK the discussions in SpaceX revolve more around things like "can this part be 3d-printed", "do we keep the actuators for part X or can it just stick out into the wind" or "should we use landing legs or not", which have nothing to do with high-school physics and everything to do with actual engineering tradeoffs.
"the starship, the worse products both companies ever built (or attempted, in the case of the starship)."
This is what tells me that you are speaking in bad faith. Starship is not yet a finished product. Judging it now makes about as sense as judging Edison's lightbulb a year before it was introduced into the market.
Starship has several issues to fix, but we can already see that a) the Raptor engines are about the best on the planet, doubly so when considering their extremely low unit cost; b) the vessel itself is very tough and performed well even in really bad situations; c) the heat shield developed a lot and the last Starship (the one which was dragged to the Christmas Island) survived reentry in very good condition; d) the amount of control (belly flops, slowing down to hover) that they have over that huge thing is unique in the history of spaceflight.
iwontberude · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
Veserv · · focus · HN ↗
Clarification, Musk bought a B.A. in physics. In the Paypal S-1 in 2002, [1] Paypal's lawyers claimed that he graduated with a B.S. in Physics and B.S. in Economics in 1995.
Yet the actual degrees subpoenaed from UPenn indicate a B.A. in Physics and B.S. in Economics in 1997, two years later. He could not even remember the year he graduated or the degree he received just 5/7 years after their purported completion. I have yet to meet a single person who actually graduated from college who can not accurately recollect the year of their graduation, have you?
Most likely he did this because he was in the USA on a student visa and dropping out of UPenn in 1995 made him a illegal immigrant which his brother, Kimbal Musk, corroborated in a interview [2].
[1] <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205702023923/a2082068zs-1.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205702...
[2] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1az29vs/elon_nervously_laughing_as_his_brother_kimbal/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1az29vs/elo...
daedalus_j · · focus · HN ↗
There you go, now you've met one!
Veserv · · focus · HN ↗
greenhat76 · · focus · HN ↗
SiempreViernes · · focus · HN ↗
greenhat76 · · focus · HN ↗
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
panick21_ · · focus · HN ↗
Starship is already the largest orbital rocket ever build and is the second rocket to actually reuse its first stage.
In addition to that the second stage has managed to land intact, something only the Shuttle did before.
People who claim like there was some superior alternative to Starship that SpaceX could 'just' have build are just ignorant. There isn't a magical 'just' build the largest rocket ever and make it fully reusable playbook you can simply execute.
greedo · · focus · HN ↗
sharlos201068 · · focus · HN ↗
ETH_start · · focus · HN ↗
On Falcon 1 and 9 he worked directly on major components of the vehicles.
In Tesla, he was heavily involved in the design of every single product they came out with. He also micromanaged Model 3 assembly automation in 2017-18.
mandeepj · · focus · HN ↗
And, DOGE!!
DoctorOetker · · focus · HN ↗
didn't musk study physics?
tekla · · focus · HN ↗